Balloons & Chutes

Saturday, September 17, 2005

Friday had seen some interest in the balloon glow at Forest Park. With OLeif and Collette, came Joe, Shakespeare (commonly known as Magnus), Rose, and Mollie. The show was rather impressive, each globe of color lit when the horn was blown and the applause from the crowd, the bagpipes and tents where kettle corn, sodas, and funnel cakes were served…

Collette felt as though she were at some sort of night carnival, which was a rather unnerving idea with the great crowds milling through the lights and smoke.

And afterward there was dinner on the walk back to the mini-van across the highway. Magnus and Mollie managed to occupy most of their time discussing the philosophies behind various forms of education, movies, and other such things. And there was much laughter on the rides to and fro, involving many jokes (likely all politically incorrect), and Magnus was about the biggest gigglebox out of them all, which was hilarious.

But Collette did not have long to sleep, however, as she awoke at 5:30 Saturday morning to attend Dad and Carrie on their sky-dive. Elizabeth also came for the ride.

After being picked up an hour later, they arrived at the small hangar at about eight o’clock, in Vandalia, Illinois. The weather could not have been more lovely on a September morning, and the breezes were just fall-like.

After watching a rather funny intro film on the sky-dive with another dad and his daughter, they were led by their instructors back into the main hangar where they slipped into their jumpsuits. Elizabeth and Collette commented on how Carrie looked just like a model, in her perfectly fitted red and black jumpsuit, running shoes, sunglasses, her hair held back in a ponytail.

“Yeah,” Carrie said later,” my instructor asked me to pull my hair back up in a bun because he said he didn’t want to eat my hair on the way down.”

Dad seemed slightly nervous. Carrie knew he would be if she jumped before he did, because he would have to watch her go out first, attached to “some strange man”, Dad joked on the way back.

After several more instructions, they filed into the little plane and Elizabeth and Collette watched as they taxied onto the field. Soon they were airborne, and over the next ten minutes as they climbed to 14,000 feet, Collette prayed that they would have a safe jump. Several other spectators had gathered on the set of picnic tables in the back of the hangar where they were roped off from the field with a row of potted jalapeños plants in white buckets.

As they strained their eyes and necks into the sun, there was soon a cry of “There they are!” as four chutes opened one after the other against the blue of the early morning sky. And within minutes, they had glided smoothly onto the green stretch across from the hangar among the cornfields. And Collette had snapped a decent amount of pictures.

Later, Dad and Collette talked about the death spirals and spins both their instructors had taken them through on the way down. And they both received certificates upon landing with applause from the ground crew and other spectators. Dad seemed just about as embarrassed as Carrie. His instructor even took a quick snapshot of Dad and placed it in his log of passengers after Dad wrote several comments next to it.

“I think I’ll take Brit and Judah to come sky-diving now,” Dad said on the way home.

Collette and Carrie agreed. When Brit and Judah had lived with them those eight summers ago, Dad had promised he would take them. But Mom put her foot down, and there was no budging her. Even when Collette had asked to go for her eighteenth birthday, Mom said there wasn’t a chance in the world. However, curiously enough when Carrie’s eighteenth came along, Mom let her go. Collette observed to Elizabeth that Carrie was rather more pushy when it came to such things, however.

“That’s our Carrie,” Elizabeth laughed.

“Very true, very true,” Collette agreed.